Lana Turner

Julia Jean "Lana" Turner (/ˈlɑːnə/ LAH-nə; February 8, 1921 – June 29, 1995) was an American actress. Over a career spanning nearly five decades, she achieved fame as both a pin-up model and a film actress, as well as for her highly publicized personal life. In the mid-1940s, she was one of the highest-paid American actresses, and one of MGM's biggest stars, with her films earning approximately one billion dollars in 2024 currency for the studio during her 18-year contract with them. Turner is frequently cited as a popular culture icon due to her glamorous persona, and a screen legend of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Born to working-class parents in Idaho, Turner spent her childhood there before her family relocated to California. In 1936, at the age of 15, she was discovered by a talent scout, while shopping at the Top Hat malt shop in Hollywood. At the age of 16, she was signed to a personal contract by Warner Bros. director Mervyn LeRoy, who took her with him when he transferred to MGM in 1938. She soon attracted attention by playing a murder victim in her screen debut, LeRoy's film They Won't Forget (1937), and she later moved into supporting roles that often cast her as an ingénue.

During the early 1940s, Turner established herself as a leading lady, and one of MGM's top stars, appearing in such films as the film noir Johnny Eager (1941), the musical Ziegfeld Girl (1941), the horror Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), and the romantic war drama Somewhere I'll Find You (1942), the latter being one of several films in which she starred opposite Clark Gable. Her reputation as a glamorous femme fatale was enhanced by her critically acclaimed performance in the film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), a role which established her as a serious dramatic actress. Her popularity continued through the 1950s, in dramas such as The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Peyton Place (1957), the latter for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.

In 1958, intense media scrutiny surrounded Turner when her lover, Johnny Stompanato, was stabbed to death by her teenage daughter, Cheryl Crane, during a domestic struggle in their home. Her next film, Imitation of Life (1959), proved to be one of the greatest commercial successes of her career, and her starring role in Madame X (1966) earned her a David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actress. She spent most of the 1970s in semi-retirement, making her final film appearance in 1980. She accepted a much-publicized, and lucrative, recurring guest role in the television series Falcon Crest in 1982, with the series subsequently garnering notably high ratings. She was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1992, and died three years later, at the age of 74.

Julia Jean Turner was born on February 8, 1921, at Providence Hospital in Wallace, Idaho. She was the only child of Mildred Frances Cowan, who hailed from Lamar, Arkansas, and John Virgil Turner, a miner from Montgomery, Alabama. Her mother had English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry, while her father was of Dutch descent. She was born four days before her mother's 17th birthday. Her parents had first met while her mother was 14 and her father was 24; Mildred was the daughter of a mine inspector and was visiting Picher, Oklahoma, a trip that was taken so her father could inspect the mines there. Mildred's father objected to the courtship, but she and John eloped and moved west before settling in Idaho.

The family lived in Burke, Idaho, at the time of Turner's birth, and relocated to nearby Wallace in 1925, where her father opened a dry cleaning service and worked in the local silver mines. As a child, Turner was known to family and friends as Judy. She expressed interest in performance at a young age, performing short dance routines at her father's Elks chapter in Wallace. When she was three, she performed an impromptu dance routine at a charity fashion show in which her mother was modeling.

The Turner family struggled financially and relocated to San Francisco when she was six years old, after which her parents separated. On December 14, 1930, her father won some money at a traveling craps game; he stuffed his winnings in his sock and headed home, but was later found bludgeoned to death on the corner of Minnesota and Mariposa Streets, on the edge of San Francisco's Potrero Hill and the Dogpatch District, with his left shoe and sock missing. His robbery and homicide were never solved, and his death had a profound effect on Turner, who was only nine years old at the time. She later said, "I know that my father's sweetness and gaiety, his warmth and his tragedy, have never been far from me. That, and a sense of loss and of growing up too fast."

Turner sometimes lived with family friends or acquaintances so that her impoverished mother could save money. They also frequently moved, for a time living in Sacramento and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Following her father's death, Turner lived for a period in Modesto with a family who physically abused her and "treated her like a servant". Her mother worked 80 hours per week as a beautician to support herself and her daughter, and Turner recalled sometimes "living on crackers and milk for half a week".